Saturday, December 29, 2012

Facebook's Poke Is a Wild Success for Rival Snapchat - Businessweek

Facebook thought it could kill Snapchat. Then it tried.

Snapchat, which lets people send self-deleting photos, videos and texts to friends, has been enjoying a steady surge in popularity. It’s not hard to see why. Even if you’re not an elected official, the ability to send self-destructing, time-limited messages does have an obvious appeal. A year after its September, 2011, launch, users were sending 20 million ‘snaps’ each day, and the app ranked just behind YouTube and Instagram on AppData’s list of free photography apps.

In early December, Facebook threw together its own Poke app, which would let users send self-destructing photos, videos, Facebook messages. It was so closely modeled on Snapchat that it led to speculation that Facebook had tried to buy the smaller company. Facebook put it together in just 12 days, and TechCrunch’s Josh Constine reports that Mark Zuckerberg wrote parts of the code himself, despite minimal involvement with day-to-day programming; the Facebook CEO also lent his voice to Poke’s audio push notifications.

Snapchat users were not impressed. They hated the new app, deriding it as an obvious ripoff. Om Malik wondered why Facebook, with all its engineering and product talent, “can’t really invent any new single online behavior that would keep people addicted to Facebook?” Slate technology writer Farhad Manjoo noted that the attempted Snapchat suckerpunch is a sign of an innovation deficit at the company. “Facebook shouldn’t be ashamed that it had to copy Poke,” wrote Manjoo. “But it should be ashamed that it never even tried to invent it.”

The attempt to usurp Snapchat only succeeded in boosting attention for the app. According to Topsy, daily mentions of Snapchat on Twitter have jumped from 27,360 to 153,900 in the week since Facebook unveiled Poke:

Topsy Analytics

At Forbes, Anthony Wing Kosner notes that, Snapchat has seen a significant uptick in popularity in the past week (AppData itself reports that Snapchat is now the #4 free app in the United States):

AppData via Forbes

This isn’t the first time that Facebook’s attempts to nudge out competition have backfired. In 2010, geolocation service Foursquare experienced a huge surge in interest after the launch of Facebook Places. Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley tweeted that it was Foursquare’s biggest day ever in terms of new user signups. Consider it a version of the Streisand effect for startups: attempts by larger companies to eliminate or acquire potential threats result in tremendous surge of publicity.

Still, Snapchat’s future is far from certain. Before the Poke showdown, Eric Eldon reported that Snapchat had raised “north of $10 million,” an investment by Benchmark Capital that valued the app company at around $70 million. But plenty of single-serving apps suffer a massive drop-off after a few weeks of hype. (When’s the last time you heard someone talk about Chatroulette?)

For now, though, the Snapchat team is likely thrilled with the unexpected attention. On the day of Poke’s launch, co-founder Evan Spiegel released a brief statement: “Welcome, Facebook. Seriously.” A week later, the message seems clear: that which does not kill us only makes us stronger.

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